Originally Posted by
bhoar
Re: DTP serial units - I support only the serial-connected (w/ firewire) ones for now. And even then, prepare to be disappointed. From my testing, the pickers on DTP units cannot handle much variance in hub-type and thickness. After five or so audio CDs, the two DTP units I tested almost invariably got stuck trying to pick because by that point the top two CDs in the input stack had somewhat "complementary" hub styles that the picker fingers can't grab between. I think the DTP units were engineered for the hub-type of blank CD-Rs in the late 90s...and are just not a great tool for random audio CD picking. It's possible the units I tested were defective or badly adjusted?
Re: DTP SCSI units. I might end up try to support for them via the debug connector on the robot controller board. Maybe. Not sure how well that will work out, though. But really, as above, I currently doubt they're useful for CD ripping.
Re: multiple robots
There's no multiple device limitation in spoon's batch ripper. You associate each drive with the right device and provide the correct command line options in the batch config (if necessary - e.g. for serial-based ones you'd need to provide the com port(s)).
There are some limitations related to the devices, however, and those relate to the manufacturer's drivers, firmware, etc.
1. Sony Changers (firewire using a somewhat broken scsi changer interface) - I seem to recall hearing about issues with addressing multiple units in windows, so you might be limited to one of those at a time (due to a bug in the changer device firmware - I suspect that under some circumstances, it thinks it should talk to the drive inside the next changer device instead of the one inside it's own). This might be remedied by not chaining them and, instead, putting them on separate firewire buses.
2. Minicubis/Baxter/DupliQ/Pico units (proprietary USB driver) - last I heard, they too were limited to one unit per system, due to driver issues. a future device driver revision from datatronics might remedy this. Note that the datatronics driver documentation seems to show support for multiple units, I suspect they just haven't properly implemented it.
3. Serial-connected changers (mf-digital, discmakers, mediatechnics, amtren, etc.) - at least two devices, probably more. The serial library I use only allows two open devices at a time. However, each serial port is in use for only a short while. I'd need to experiment more to see if there's going to be a problem with more than 2 units.
On the plus side, I doubt there'd be a problem using several manual load drives, a baxter, a sony changer and two serial robots all at once.
Caveat: It's all experimental, no guarantees. e.g. my drivers still don't do the right thing at the end of a batch at the moment.
-brendan